Standard Chartered Forecasts a $2.7 Trillion DeFi Surge by 2030

Standard Chartered's new call is not simply that tokenisation grows. It is that tokenised assets become the fuel decentralised finance runs on.

Standard Chartered put a number on the next phase of tokenisation this week, and it is a big one. In research published on 15 June, the bank's digital assets team forecast that the total value locked across decentralised finance could reach 2.7 trillion dollars by 2030. That is roughly a 37 fold jump from where DeFi sits today.

Taken alone, the figure invites the usual scepticism. The sector has produced no shortage of trillion dollar projections, and most reveal more about ambition than delivery. What makes this one worth reading closely is the mechanism the bank points to, not the headline.

The argument runs through tokenised real world assets. Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick, who leads the bank's digital assets research, expects the value of tokenised assets sitting onchain to climb from around 340 billion dollars now to 4 trillion dollars by the end of 2028. The more telling claim is what happens after that. Today only about 3.5 per cent of those tokenised assets are actually put to work inside DeFi protocols. The bank thinks that share could reach 30 per cent by the end of the decade.

That second number is the real forecast. It is one thing for a bank to tokenise a money market fund and let it sit in a wallet. It is another for that token to become collateral, to be lent against, to settle a trade, to move through an automated protocol with no custodian in the middle. Standard Chartered is betting that the tokenised treasuries, funds and credit instruments now being issued by the likes of BlackRock and JPMorgan stop being static records and start circulating as working capital onchain.

The forecast lands only a couple of weeks after Citi set out its own 2030 view, projecting a tokenised securities market of around 5.5 trillion dollars. It is tempting to file both under the same heading. They are not quite the same claim. Citi was sizing the pool of tokenised assets. Standard Chartered is asking how much of that pool ends up doing work inside open, programmable finance. The first is a question about issuance. The second is a question about plumbing, and the second is harder.

For readers building or backing companies in the UK, the useful takeaway is not the size of the number. It is the direction it points. A bank does not publish a 2.7 trillion dollar DeFi forecast unless it expects regulated institutions to grow comfortable holding and moving tokenised assets in places that looked, until recently, like the wild frontier. That shift in posture matters more than any single projection.

It also exposes a gap. Most of this forecast concerns liquid, standardised assets: treasuries, money market funds, large credit pools. The tokenised assets a British founder actually cares about, private company shares, startup equity, early stage fund interests, are a long way from being DeFi collateral. They are illiquid, bespoke and tightly held. The work that brings them onchain in a useful way is happening in slower, more regulated corners. The FCA's fund tokenisation rules. The Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox. The PISCES venues now opening for private share trading. None of that shows up in a DeFi total value locked chart.

So the honest reading is two sided. The institutional money is coming, and the infrastructure to hold tokenised assets is maturing fast. But the part of the story that would change life for an early stage founder in Manchester or Cardiff, real liquidity for private equity, is the part the banks are quietest about. Worth holding both thoughts at once.

Kendrick also initiated coverage on Uniswap as part of the research, with a price target that assumes the protocol captures a meaningful slice of this growth. That is a trading call, and readers should treat it as one. The structural point stands on its own.

Key Takeaways

• Standard Chartered forecasts DeFi total value locked reaching 2.7 trillion dollars by 2030, a 37 fold rise, driven mainly by tokenised real world assets.

• The bank expects tokenised assets onchain to grow from about 340 billion dollars to 4 trillion dollars by the end of 2028, with the share used inside DeFi rising from 3.5 per cent to roughly 30 per cent.

• The forecast follows Citi's recent 2030 projection but asks a different question: not how big the tokenised market gets, but how much of it actually circulates in open finance.

• For UK founders the signal is institutional comfort with tokenised assets, though private company equity remains far from the liquid, standardised assets these forecasts describe.

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Sources

• blockchain.news, DeFi TVL Could Hit $2.7T by 2030, StanChart Predicts (16 Jun 2026)

• Bloomingbit, Standard Chartered Sees DeFi Growing 37-Fold by 2030 on Tokenized Asset Inflows (16 Jun 2026)

• Cointribune, Tokenization could propel DeFi to $2.7 trillion by 2030 according to Standard Chartered (16 Jun 2026)

• Coinpedia, Standard Chartered Sees UNI Reaching $100 by 2030 on Tokenization Boom (15 Jun 2026)